iBootBar Remote Reboot - control power on your terminal servers remotely
Often administrators have would like to to turn off or reboot a server remotely.
We have this problem every two weeks. Every two weeks we were testing our virtualized backup images of all terminal servers. (In future posts I will describe how we managed to backup multiple physical Terminal servers on one virtual using VMWare). Servers are collocated to another continent 
When backup system is tested we need to turn off our terminal servers and boot virtual servers that are identical to the production servers. This is required because in order to avoid duplicate IP or NETBIOS name (virtual servers have the same network configuration as the production servers).
Before we bought ibootbar Appliance we had to call somebody to go to the company and turn on the production servers. This procedure is always tested over weekend so employees were not happy to come to work just to plugin the servers.
We decided to implement remote power control for servers and choose iBootBar appliance because it has support for TCP/IP protocol.
Picture shows a scheme of the implemented solution.
Solid lines are network connections and bold lines in the bottom are the power lines. Users are using server via regular network connection. ibootbar and backup server are also connected to same switch because users and administrators are entering network via one switch. Power is plugged into iBootBar and then from iBootBar into servers.
In production only terminal server is turned on. Backup terminal is off. Users are connecting via network switch to terminal server.
Here is the backup procedure performed via iBootbar:
- Backup server is turned on via iBootBar
- While backup server is on we can connect to it via RDP (server has the same network name and network configuration as production server)
- When tests are over, we will turn off backup server from RDP and use iBootBar to turn on the production server.
iBoorBar console is accessible via web console and only thing you will need to allow is HTTPS traffic though firewall to iBoorBar.
Our iBoorbar has external IP so we are able to connect to it from anywhere without problem and control power on all of our servers.
For any extra information I would recommend iBootbar homepage at his webiste